This week on Active Information I wrote about Dave McCrory’s newly published Data Gravity formula. If you are unfamiliar with Data Gravity:

“McCrory’s premise is that as your data migrates to the cloud, say through the use of a CRM application, it will pull related, satellite applications and services into the cloud. As those satellite applications and services produce and consume additional data, your data mass grows, increasing the gravitational pull, which migrates more applications and services to the cloud, and the cycle continues.“

Via the open source monkeys, cloud developers everywhere will have an opportunity to learn how Netflix manages a spike laden business on Amazon’s cloud. In addition to the open source news, the article provides a nice overview of the business problem Netflix is solving, why they went cloud, how open source helps with recruiting talent, and profiles one of their big talents, Adrian Cockcroft.

An excerpt:

“Netflix is getting ready to unleash its Simian Army.

The online movie rental company uses a troupe of cloud software — it calls the programs “monkeys” — that poke and prod its online applications and keep the website and its services humming along.

There’s a Chaos Monkey, a program that randomly kills virtual machines to make sure that small outages will not disrupt the overall system. They’ve got Security Monkey — it looks for configuration and security flaws — and Janitor Monkey, too: It looks for system resources that aren’t being used and shuts them down.

Over the next few months Netflix will release the source code for these programs and more, giving cloud developers a look at how it runs its services on Amazon’s cloud. The plan is “to release pretty much all of our platform, including the Monkey infrastructure, over the rest of this year,” says Adrian Cockcroft, the Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix. “We will be doing bits and pieces of it through the summer and into the fall.””

The typical connection between social technologies and collective intelligence is the reams of data shared by individuals via venues such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Wikipedia. Collective intelligence as source of big data. More recently, emerging companies are applying collective intelligence to solve (your) big data problems. [Lots of link easter eggs]